Modeling the social brain

Dr. Xiaosi Gu, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Biomedical Informatics & Data Science, and Director of the Computational Psychiatry Unit at Yale School of Medicine

Formerly: Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Department of Neuroscience, Director of the Computational Psychiatry Unit, Friedman Brain Institute & Addiction Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

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Presentation Slides:

What?

This presentation describes our recent work demonstrating how the brain computes norms and social controllability. Leveraging recent advances in decision neuroscience, our social models address questions related to how we form beliefs about social norms and how we use model-based planning to influence others and estimate the controllability of our social interactions.

Why?

Computational modeling approaches can break down a seemingly subjective and complex mental process (e.g. such as our beliefs about people) into detailed cognitive components. Furthermore, you can create simulations as well as make predictions about how people might behave, given a set of defined parameters.

How?

Prerequisites include a good understanding of the decision neuroscience and cognitive modeling literature, and some basic programming skills in Matlab, R, or Stan. We are glad to openly share anonymized data and codes. Feel free to contact us at: xiaosi.gu@mssm.edu
Reference publications: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/737353v2.full; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25589742/
Computational Psychiatry Unit at Mount Sinai
Computational Psychiatry Summer Course
Computational Psychiatry Journal